Tor project considers covering costs for exit nodes

The maintainers of the Tor Project -- which provides more anonymous and private Internet use by bouncing traffic around many volunteers' computers -- is considering paying $100/month to people who maintain high-speed "exit nodes." "Exit nodes" are the last hop in the Tor chain, and they sometimes attract legal threats and police attention, which makes some people reluctant to run them. As a result, there aren't enough exit nodes to provide really robust anonymity for Tor users. Tor hopes that by covering costs for organizations and individuals who are willing to provide exit nodes, they'll get more diversity in the population of exits. Darren Pauli has more in SC magazine:

"We've lined up our first funder BBG, and they're excited to have us start as soon as we can," Dingledine wrote on the Tor mailing list.

The backflip came about because exit node diversity was low: most Tor users choose one of just five of the fastest exit relays about a third of the time, from a pool of about 50 relays.

"Since extra capacity is clearly good for performance, and since we're not doing particularly well at diversity with the current approach, we're going to try [the] experiment," he said.

100/month is a fair price to pay for being banned from 4chan,and a number of other websites, forever.
its the only reason i havent set up a tor exit node, and i dont want the police knocking down my door for something someone did from my exit node.

it’s more likely than you think.
go to 4chan on tor, every single exit node is banned…most for child pornography. opening a tor exit node is guaranteeing your ip gets banned. they will ban you just for BEING a tor exit node (though they depend on you confessing this offense obviously…but i have had a few times i go to 4chan on tor and the node is banned with the reason given as “being a tor exit node”)
i mean if the FBI wanted a pretty complete list of tor exit nodes the 4chan ban list would be a pretty good start.

I’m still wary of hosting an exit node because of the stories about people getting arrested for child porn because someone used their Tor exit node to look at it. Until the law is changed so that won’t happen, $100/month isn’t enough for me to open myself up to that kind of liability.